This week, official Washington will play host to an army of anti-global protesters flown in special from Seattle. Actually, the festivities began last week: human chains, banners, chanting, mobile-phone congestion, etc.
It’s not that protesters-as a matter of courtesy-waited until after the cherry blossom season here to storm the nation’s capital. Just so happens finance ministers from around the world are in town this week for the start of talks at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Several blocks away, Congress is gearing up for debate on China trade.
Just what is this anti-globalization movement about? If you ask the ring leaders, they’ll tell you it’s about suffocating poor countries with unbearable debt that keeps them from spending on health, education and infrastructure-like wireless telecom.
If the World Trade Organization is what you’re talking about, global naysayers see it as an elite club for big business that by design ignores the environment and labor, religious, political and human rights.
There’s some truth to what protesters say. And yet they have it backward.
That they lend money to poor countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere to pull them from the depths of despair do not make the IMF and World Bank evil global institutions. The reasons loans are made and not repaid have more to do with inept and/or corrupt domestic governments.
All the chaos wrought by protesters in Seattle and promised here puzzles the Establishment. The economy is good. Jobs are plentiful. Inflation is down. And mobile phones now come in different colors. So why all the fuss?
Well, for one thing, global lending institutions and their wealthy members have been slow to forgive foreign debt and fast to attach austere economic measures to loans that never seem to work. Moreover, loans have been made to countries that should not have been made.
Indeed, the World Bank and IMF are on the hit list of some in Congress.
Elite global bureaucrats, for their part, tend to look down on protesters and consider them anarchists. Some are. Truth is, the real anarchy that is occurring comes not so much from protesters as from the emerging global economy and its networked affiliates. No one really knows how this brave new world works, or what it means. No one controls how much money flows in or out of a country on a given day. Technology is erasing geographic boundaries; national sovereignty is fading. Digital economies are nonlinear, and multilayered business relationships make it anybody’s guess who controls whom.
It’s exciting, but for protesters it rings a unsettling note.
